"Peace of Mind In The Sun"

Guest Post: Your Skin is Like an Elephant

Now that Skin Cancer Awareness Month has come and gone please continue to be diligent in your sun protection efforts. Your skin remembers. Thank you to Emily from Em and Michael’s Blog for letting me borrow and share this blog post. Feel free to comment and also visit their blog. It is full of personal stories, triumphs, battles and most of all courage and inspiration.

One of things a young lady with melanoma says in the “Dear 16-Year old Me” video is that your skin is like an elephant – it remembers the damage you do to it. She is so right, but young people still don’t seem to get it. I don’t blame them, for most of my life, I didn’t get it either.

As I scroll through Twitter and search the word “melanoma”, I see the latest news in the world of the most deadly skin cancer and I also read things that make my stomach turn. Young girls Tweet stuff like this all the time: “The last thing I want to do right now is write a paper on Malignant Melanoma… REALLY?! #Ilovetotan” and “It’s people getting ugly season..I refuse to participate #GTL” or “Think 9 mins on the beds today was a little to much but it will be worth it !! #tantastic” Note the hash tags: #Ilovetotan, #tantastic, #GTL (GTL = Gym, tan, laundry.. which comes from the stupid people on Jersey Shore). Men are just as guilty. Today I saw a self proclaimed “Tanorexic” from England announce that he has melanoma on Twitter. He even went to the dermatologist appointment “lobster red”. Do they not know that Melanoma is the most common cancer found in people aged 25 to 29 and the second-most-common cancer in people aged 15 to 29 years old?

No wonder the rates for melanoma are going up in this segment of the population. It is all about vanity. They want to look good now and aren’t concerned with the future. What they don’t understand: If you damage your skin now, you will pay for it down the road. Not just with wrinkles, but with a deadly, devastating disease. It might not happen right away, but it could be 5 years, or perhaps 10 or 20 years down the road. The reality is we just don’t know – so why risk it?

Last month California passed the first ever ban on sunbed use for those under 18. It is a huge victory and I was one of the people who sent our governor a letter in support of passing this new law. It makes sense to me. You wouldn’t give your kid a pack of cigarettes, so why would you let them go to a sunbed? In the past we didn’t look at the sun as a carcinogen, but now if you go into a tanning bed or purposely burn your skin, you must understand the consequences. It will affect your cells. It will mutate your genes. If you are unlucky enough to have a cancer gene in your genetic makeup, perhaps passed down from your ancestors, then you are at an even higher risk. Maybe it would only take 2 bad sunburns to mutate your genetic code to the point that melanoma grows uncontrolled. You just don’t know what lies inside you, so why not try and prevent those mutations and stay out of the sunbeds?

If you say to yourself “It wont happen to me, I don’t have fair skin, I am too young for cancer”. You are wrong. It can happen to anyone, at any age. Some examples are below.

I am so honored to be a guest blogger on the UVSkinz Blog! I wanted to thank you for all of the amazing things you do to help people protect their skin. As Rhonda knows, I went to high school with Darren http://www.uvskinz.com/darren.aspx . I was just looking at pictures from the San Mateo High Senior trip to Mexico back in 1987. We were all so tan, it really shocked me. I could never imagine back then that our tan could actually hurt us. That is why we must drive home the point to our young children and teenagers that what they do now will affect their lives down the road.

I grew up in Hawaii, where as a baby I was allowed 30 seconds a day in the sun…gradually it increased. (I am very pale skinned!) I acquired a great base tan. Then we moved to the SF Bay area…where the worst sunburns I’ve had were at a cloud covered beach in Half Moon Bay…more than once. Then, after 10 years in LA’s smog heaven, I moved myself and the very young toddler (then), the guest blogger Emily to Phoenix. One day in April in the 1970′s she and I and were at a concert (it was the filming of Barbara Streisand’s A Star Is Born and we sat in the AZ sun for about 8 hours. I went home, looked in the mirror, and saw something I didn’t like which turned out to be skin cancer. That was just ONE exposure built on years of exposure. Luckily it wasn’t melanoma. Still…I didn’t KNOW about the ozone hole, and the prediction by scientists in the 1970′s that Melanoma was going to increase greatly because the ozone hole was getting huge. I even let the guest blogger go to the tanning salons! Great blog, Emily!